Are you not aware of how many billions are getting spent on fake girlfriends on Only Fans, with millions of people chatting away with low paid labor across an ocean pretending to be an american girl? This is just reducing costs, but the consumers are already wanting the product.
I'm not sure I get the outrage / puritanism. Adults being able to chat to a fake girlfriend if they want to seems super bland. There's way more stuff out there that's way wilder you can do online, potentially also exploiting the real person on the other side of the screen if they are trafficked or whatever. I don't have any mental issues (well, who knows? ha) and genuinely would try it the same way you try a new porn category every once in a while.
The net sum of all LLM B2C usecases (effectively Chatgpt) is competing with AI girlfriends for rank 1.
It isn't just huge. It is the most profitable usecase for gen AI.
"A goal of a system is what it does"
"The internet is for porn" https://youtu.be/LTJvdGcb7Fs?si=8H1OzeyG5XzU-Qe8